Wang Ruowang, 83, Writer And Dissident Exiled by China

Published: December 23, 2001

Wang Ruowang, the prominent Chinese dissident writer who was jailed by China's Communist government and later became an exile, died Wednesday in Queens, his dream of returning to China unfulfilled. He was 83.

Mr. Wang died in Elmhurst Hospital two weeks after doctors told him he had terminal cancer, said Liu Qing, another Chinese dissident living in New York.

Mr. Wang remained defiant, refusing the Chinese government's offer, a week before he died, to let him back into the country -- a wish Mr. Wang had held since he left Shanghai in 1992 to become a visiting scholar at Columbia University, Mr. Liu said.

The offer was conditional on Mr. Wang's promise not to publish articles criticizing the government or meet with dissidents, Mr. Liu said.

A prolific writer of essays and literary criticism, Mr. Wang was a thorn in the side of Chinese governments for more than 60 years.

The Nationalists who ruled China before 1949 jailed Mr. Wang in the 1930's for belonging to the Communist Youth League. Mr. Liu said that Mr. Wang was sentenced to 10 years but served only 3 or 4.

In 1937, Mr. Wang joined the Communist Party after the 1949 Communist takeover that forced the Nationalists to flee to Taiwan.

But he soon fell out of favor because of his satirical writings criticizing the government. In 1957, he was expelled from the party.

After the Cultural Revolution erupted in 1966, Mr. Wang was imprisoned for four years.

Mr. Wang's political standing was rehabilitated in 1979, after the death of Mao and the ascendancy of Deng Xiaoping, and his party membership was restored. But he angered the government again by publishing calls for human rights and democratic reforms. He was expelled from the party again in 1987.

''Party organizations patiently criticized and educated him on many occasions but he refused to mend his ways,'' a Shanghai party leader, Rui Xingwen, said of Mr. Wang. ''He asserted that he would fight to the end.''

When student-led protests erupted in 1989, Mr. Wang wrote a letter to Deng in support of the protesters and helped to lead a march on Shanghai's city hall. For that he was jailed for 14 months.

Mr. Wang is survived by his wife, Yang Zi, and seven children. Two of his children flew from Shanghai to be at his bedside hours before his death.